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A few weeks ago I suddenly realized that this summer marks the hundredth and first anniversary of the birth of Dr. Ida Halpern, musicologist, critic, and one of the great movers and shakers of the Vancouver music scene. Since then it’s been impossible to stop a flood of memories.

Dr. Halpern (as most of Vancouver knew her from 1940 until her death in early 1987) was born in Vienna, trained as a pianist, then studied the emerging science of vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (“comparative musicology,” or as we now call it, ethnomusicology) at Vienna University. To use one of her own phrases, she became one of “Hitler’s gifts” to North America, and she began her life’s work researching the music of the first nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest almost by accident, when Vancouver looked like a fairly good place to settle after the dual traumas of leaving Vienna and then Shanghai.

She became a broadcaster, columnist, and the music critic for The Province. I knew about her long before I knew her: many members of my family took her fabled music appreciation courses and, of course, read her published opinions. That I was drawn into her orbit was something of a fluke, but for a decade I worked with her on various research projects. I consider the experience one of the most intense of my life—a sort of unofficial doctorate in musicology, criticism and history.

Thanks to Dr Halpern (and her chemist husband Dr George Halpern) I got a long, intensive glimpse into the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s, and garnered such useful, if scattered, bits of information as how the Viennese bon ton considered it terribly un-chic to wear white after August; the small (but so significant) differences between a “Grossdeutschlander” and a “big old Nazi”; and the correct, Viennese way to preface any demand with a sweet thick layer of “Could you be so kind?” or “Would you possibly be able to?”

This was all heady stuff for a Vancouver-born WASP. And it changed my life. Canadians, with their bland niceness and slavish adherence to rules, were termed “Boy Scouts” by both Drs Halpern; who knew I had a natural merit badge in those stuffy virtues?

Nothing was sacred to their post-World War One generation, and a streak of sugared cynicism was always there. Everything was complicated, too. Questions of who stayed, who left, and who re-invented themselves by editing their CVs were debated con fuoco ad infinitum. Halpern was naturally combative, and some of her feuds proved legendary. (Her enemies—and the occasional friend—disparaged her as “Haida Ida.”)

In a way she was something of a social chamaeleon. Dr. Halpern read Latin and spoke English, French, bad Italian, German, and Wienerisch with voluble gusto. Her slips in English were often more expressive than the authorized standard version of the language. Three of my all time favourites were “Hold your horse,” the “Royal Canadian Mountain Police,” and “hillybillies.” But when she truly believed in something, like the value of native culture (and its corollary that First Nations people were treated with callous injustice by the Canadian establishment), she exuded a fierce sincerity, the hidden x factor that allowed her to successfully preserve hundreds of examples of music from the peoples of our coast when so many others failed.

The best picture of Dr. Halpern (or at least the one she liked most) shows her in her West Point Grey living room with her then- advanced record cutting machine in front of her—a cumbersome beast that she lugged on float planes hither and thither to record First Nations singers. In the background are a selection of argillite carvings and some striking prints. It’s a nice bit of staging: the argillites and prints weren’t normally in the room; several Lawren Harrises and Emily Carrs were. (Buried somewhere in SFU’s archives there’s another image, a drawing—almost a caricature—by Jack Shadbolt showing a group of Halpern friends listening to the radio during the war. Unsurprisingly, IH is the vortex of the chatting group, looking right out at the viewer with bemused confidence.)

In the final years of their lives, both Drs. Halpern gave a good deal of thought to what would become of their art, her research materials, and a not unsubstantial estate. Canada had been good to them and they were grateful. Her recordings and papers went to the Provincial Archives; there was a sizable donation to the University of Victoria; Simon Fraser University got the art, the antiques, and the remainder of their estate. (I was astonished to find myself one of their executors, and even more flummoxed to inherit some favourite pieces and her collection of printed music, much of it on the “entartete kunst” list of Nazi-banned materials, and all of it smuggled out of post-Anschluss Austria.)

My recent role as one of Vancouver’s music critics would have come as no surprise at all to Ida Halpern; she liked my writing style, and over a decade’s worth of conversations made sure that I could defend my opinions and tastes to her exacting standards.

Whenever I have stop and think about what I want to say about some event I’m reviewing the useful question “What would Dr. Halpern have made of it?” invariably clarifies my mind. In an instant, it’s all easy from then on.

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